Sunday, September 16, 2007

A Blast From The Past

I was sent a link by a friend the other day to some screenshots of a game I worked on years ago at Argonaut Software. The game was called Croc - The Legend Of The Gobo's; On the old GameBoy Color handheld console.

My role on the game was as a software engineer. My main task was writing the games editor. This allowed the designer to build the levels out of tiles, set collision zones on tiles and in game characters.

Becuase the GameBoy Color was a ROM based games machines. The game couldn't load up individual files. This meant that my editor had to convert all the tiles/graphics/maps into Z80 machine code. This was a tricky task, but one that was fun to work on.

The graphics were done by my long time school friend Chris Rundell. He worked at Argonaut as a contractor at the time. The GameBoy Color was a very limited machine graphically, but Chris's art style meant he could make the graphics look like they had many more colors than there were.

The game design was done by Anna Larke. She was responsible for designing the levels and building the maps using my editor, out of the tiles that Chris created.

All sound and music was created by Juston Sharvona. After all the testing we did on the game, the main theme tune still makes me shudder. Not because it is bad, but because I listened to it so many times.

It has been good to get hold of some screen shots of this game. This was back in the good ol days of games creation. Back when it was fun. Brings back a lot of memories looking at the old screenshots. I think I still have a copy of the ROM up in the loft. I still remember fondly our arguments with Nintendo and how they wanted us to remove some graphics of up-turned crucifixes from Baron Dante's Castle. :-)